Originally Posted by
criso
A couple of thoughts
People will still hover around the gates as even within a group, they want to be near the front to maximise the chance to get overhead locker space so if group 4 was economy, that still might be a large group and pushing your way to the front, hovering near the entrance blocking people could still mean the difference between getting your bag on board and not. This is not helped by there not being a large enough seated waited area, if passengers are already standing they may as well hover.
LHR C-Gates seem to have a few issues with space.
Many a time I've arrived a bit early and stood against the wall. Over the next few minutes, more people arrive, see a lot of seats are occupied (or they might have to sit next to someone), so they stand as close to the tensa barrier entrance as possible.
Eventually, usually 10 minutes or so later than expected, they then start to call people to board and it's a free for all where you've no idea who's who and you don't always want to be shoving people with the same priority as you out the way to get to the front.
Then they call economy etc. and they end up boarding 5x as quick as your queue.
Would be nice if they used the 4 lanes on some gates, but the whole airport doesn't seem to have been designed to facilitate orderly queuing.